Wok of Life of a Wannabe Wanderer?

Year-end is almost always associated with holidays (at least for me..). It’s time when people take their leave for vacation overseas, department stores start to give discounts, and those who celebrate Christmas are busy in preparation for the festive.

As usual, I’m spending the year-end back home at Batam. Different from previous years in which I took leave from December to January, this year leave is fully in 2007. Thanks to two public holidays in December, I can take a full two-week off from Jakarta. Get away from that xxxxxxx city for a while.

My family has moved to Batam Island for quite a while but house in Buluh Island, the place where I was born is still kept. Yesterday I made a visit there for chinese tradition of honouring and praying for my late grandfather. It was nice to go back to the place where you grew up and spent your childhood time there.

Speaking about the praying tradition, there’s indeed a lot of tradition in Chinese culture which many of them are considered as "superstition" in the eye of people who are now living in the science and technology era. For example, there’s a pair of crescent shape craft wood used to sort of "asking" to your ancestor or to the God and Goddess about your question. Each of the wood has two sides, i.e. open and close. Open is when the flat side of the wood faces up, leaving the bumpy side below, while vice versa, close is when the flat side of the wood faces down the earth, leaving the bumpy side upwards. If one wood faces up and another faces down, it’s considered as "agree". If both of them are open, it’s considered as "don’t agree in laugh manner", while another combination is considered as "don’t agree in angry manner".

I was asked by my mother to ask the question whether it’s OK if we are going to pray using only six kind of dishes, one bowl each for the next praying instead of two bowls each. The first one resulted in both open. Haha.. I repeated again, and the second time the results was the same, both open. No third round was performed though as my mom was already convinced that she stopped me from doing that.

When you think of that from science perspective, it just doesn’t make sense. How could you use the one-third outcome chance from each throw to ask question. It’s really superstitious. But if you dive deeper, you will see that those who still preserve a very traditional Chinese way still do that often. People are asking various questions. Is it good to continue their study here there? Is the job is good? Is it OK to start a new business ? There’s also other mean of sophisticated way to ask God and Goddess, through what is called "Ciam-Xi" in which you’re shaking a pot of wood-stick to pick one.

For me, I’m quite in a neutral position for this. Neither ignore it nor believe it completely. My standing point is that take it as precaution but don’t be too paranoid about it. What about you? Are you a superstitious one ?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.